CHALLENGE

Since its founding nearly 35 years ago, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has always enjoyed a highly positive image among potential job candidates, particularly with new graduates. Because of this widespread admiration for its mission, every year the agency receives many thousands more employment inquiries than it has positions to fill.

For EPA’s human-capital strategists, this consistent “employer of choice” status over three decades has been highly gratifying. Even so, they were confident that they could fine-tune their recruitment programs to attract candidates who were even more precisely suited to the positions that they needed to fill, including policy and planning specialists, IT professionals, lawyers, and scientists and engineers in all disciplines.

They envisioned new efficiencies in candidate attraction and selection, as well as improved mission performance as this new talent came on line in EPA operations. Their objective: To find and attract candidates who were not only qualified, talented and inspired by the idea of working at the EPA, but who were also more likely to perform productively in EPA’s unique workplace culture.

SOLUTION

EPA engaged Monster Government Solutions (MGS) to assist the agency in crafting a Talent Brand that would attract top performers who shared the aspirations and character traits that predicted successful contributions to the agency’s mission and operations.

MGS’s Brand Imagination team worked closely with EPA’s human-capital management to discover the most compelling cultural attributes and attractors in the agency’s culture. The team conducted interviews with EPA executives and led focus groups with rank-and-file associates around the country, and built and administered an associate survey to capture an authentic sense of what it’s really like to work at the agency.

Armed with these and other findings, the team crafted an EPA Talent Brand and Value Platform, which would jointly serve as the thematic baseline for developing authentic and resonant recruitment advertising and internal workforce development programs at the agency.

RESULT

EPA’s human-capital managers at all levels enthusiastically embraced the new Talent Brand, and MGS immediately set out to implement a recruitment outreach campaign and careers Web site to put the Talent Brand’s key themes into play.

At the same time, EPA strategists also commissioned the MGS team to continue to refine the brand, notably by working with the agency’s front-line recruiters nationwide and testing its relevance among diversity segments and Gen X and Gen Y audiences.

Today, the EPA Talent Brand serves as an evolving baseline for a new array of creative initiatives aimed at enriching EPA’s workplace with high-fliers who are both energized by the environmental mission and ready to get down to work on practical solutions that serve the public good in concrete ways.